Chapter 73
JUSTINE AND SCOTTY knocked and entered Mr. Tong’s classroom, a laboratory with windows in the back wall giving a view of the upslope of the canyon.
A long desk was centered between the windows, and on both sides of the desk were floor-to-ceiling shelves lined with hundreds of jars of preserved animals and body parts.
Between the desk and where Justine and Scotty stood in the doorway were two dozen spanking-new workstations outfitted with cutting-edge microscopes and computers. Three chrome carts packed with cages of white mice were randomly parked like shopping carts in a supermarket lot.
The whole operation was impressive, and Justine thought it spoke of high tuition, generous alumni support, and a faculty that wanted only the best so as to attract the best.
A man sat on a stool at the back of the lab, his head bent over a gas chromatograph/mass spectrometer, a pricey piece of forensic equipment used for trace analysis and not usually found in high-school labs.
Justine called out, “Hello, Mr. Tong?” and the man working at the GC/MS turned around.
He was Asian, of medium height and build, wearing a tight white T-shirt, black jeans, and neon-green track shoes. He wore his hair in a brush cut, and his thick glasses had red plastic frames. He had a wide and electrifying smile.
Tong bounced off his stool, stepped forward with his hand outstretched, and introduced himself to Justine and Scotty.
“I’m very glad to meet you.”
“Good to meet you too,” said Justine. “Thanks for offering to help.”
“I will if I can.”
Tong led Scotty and Justine to his desk, brought over some stools, and said, “I understand you’re interested in this rash of car bombings. I was victim number one, you know. I gave the police names of people to interrogate. They refused to do it.”
Scotty asked, “Why do you think they refused?”
“I told them that the arsonists were kids,” Tong said, “but I had no proof.”
“You had some reason to believe what you told the cops?”
“Sure. As a group, the kids here are overeducated and un-dercivilized. But they are smart. They function at college level, even in the ninth grade. They seem angelic, but they’re fearless. And they don’t respect authority. Not at all.”
Tong polished his glasses, repositioned them on the bridge of his nose, and went on. “Add their rich parents to the mix, and you can see that the school must have kept everything quiet. Look, no one died, so no one cared—until now.”
Justine averted her eyes from quart jars of assorted eyeballs. She said to Tong, “See, what worries me is that arsonists escalate.”
“Dr. Smith, that worries me too. I’ve blown the whistle and I have rung the bell. The headmaster and the board have told me to shut the hell up or get out. If I’m blacklisted by the headmaster, I can’t get another job in LA. Maybe I can’t get another job anywhere.”
“We’re private investigators,” Scotty said. “Private.”
Tong nodded. He opened his desk drawer, took out a small notebook, flipped through it. Then he pulled a page out of the binding and handed it to Scotty.
It was a handwritten list of names.
“Please keep me out of this,” said Tong. “One of these insects set fire to my car. Next time, they could set fire to me.”